Organization Man: Karl Rove and the rise of the SuperPAC.
Just four years after he slid out of the White House as the embattled Rasputin to a flailing president, Karl Rove has reinvented himself as the dominant private citizen in the Republican Party. He is today a driving force behind both the powerful advocacy organization Crossroads GPS and its even more influential sibling, American Crossroads, the largest SuperPAC on the right. Meanwhile, even as he has been raising money to defeat Democrats, the 60-year-old Rove has carved out a second career as a well-paid pundit for Fox News and as a columnist for The Wall Street Journal—and, in that role, he has been at times merciless in policing his own side of the political spectrum. As the Republican campaign has unfolded, Rove the pundit has frequently seemed offended by the self-destructiveness of every GOP contender not named “Mitt Romney.” From the outset, Rove belittled longtime foe Rick Perry for reinforcing his dumb “cowboy from Texas” image. He was scathing over Michele Bachmann’s false claims that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. And, after Herman Cain catastrophically botched a question about Libya, Rove dubbed him “not ready for prime time.”
The upshot of all this activity is that, for the second time in recent years, political junkies of both the right and the left are obsessed with Rove’s nefarious influence. Based on his Fox News critiques, some Tea Partiers, including Cain, believe that he is secretly in the Romney camp, even though Rove has never been close to the former Massachusetts governor. Democrats, in turn, seize on every TV commercial that American Crossroads puts on the air as evidence that Rove still practices guttersnipe politics. A mid-November press release from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) was headlined: “KARL ROVE’S RIGHT WING FRONT GROUP PROPS UP SENATE REPUBLICANS WITH ATTACK ADS.” These days, Rove vies with Rush Limbaugh as the leading target of liberal demonology.
There is no doubt, certainly, that Rove is influential. But, as I spent time speaking to insiders from both parties about him, I initially struggled to pin down the exact nature of his resurgent influence. The classic line on Rove has always been that his political instincts are unrivaled by any Republican since the heyday of his mentor, Lee Atwater. Yet, while Crossroads undoubtedly played an important role in the 2010 campaign by flooding the airwaves with ads for Republican Senate candidates, the only thing memorable about these ads was their omnipresence. Moreover, Crossroads failed to dislodge Harry Reid, even though the Rove groups spent more than $4.3 million in Nevada. “There’s nothing they’ve been putting out there that’s distinctive,” says J.B. Poersch, who endured the 2010 Crossroads ad barrage as executive director of the DSCC. Indeed, the chapter in Rove’s 2010 autobiography, Courage and Consequence, describing a Rovian campaign is filled with commonplace observations, such as, “A campaign’s essential argument must be easily understood, capable of being widely disseminated, backed by evidence, and authentic.” That is not exactly like being handed the secret formula for Coca-Cola.
Even as they gush over Rove, Republican disciples find it hard to explain his unique talents. “He is very sharp in messaging,” explains Rick Wiley, the political director of the Republican National Committee. “He reads polls constantly. With a TV ad, you have only seventy-five words. He knows what those seventy-five words are and in what order they should be.” It’s hard to see how that distinguishes him from many other political strategists. Moreover, if you listen to his comments about the candidates on Fox News or read them in The Wall Street Journal, they are often little more than the conventional wisdom. In truth, most of Rove’s horse-race punditry would be unremarkable if the same words (“This is not a good week for Herman Cain”) were delivered by a non-polarizing commentator like Chuck Todd or Carl Cameron.